HARNESSING HEMP
Environmental, economic vision drives move to legalize industrial hemp
Stories By Michael Dorgan
AT THE CORE of the emerging "hempster" movement is a vision of a new world order that would make George Bush's head spin. It's a vision of a hemp-based economy.
Imagine dense fields of hemp - also known as cannabis or marijuana - being legally cultivated throughout the country for fuel fiber, food and medicine.
Much of the crop is converted to biomass fuels to generate electricity and to replace gasoline and heating oil, eliminating dependance on foreign petroleum. The plant's longest fibers are woven to fabric for clothes and carpets or pressed into particleboard for lumber that's stronger than wood. Cellulose and shorter fibers are processed into paper and plastics, saving forests and further reducing the need for petroleum. Oil from the seeds, meanwhile, is made into foods, soaps, cosmetics and even rayon-like fabrics.
A pothead's pipe dream? Maybe, but a growing number of sober experts contend the hempster movement is onto something big.
"We are tending to move toward a carbohydrate economy and away from a petrochemical economy, and the reasons are environmentat and economic," said Bud Sholts, Wisconsin's director of agricultural development and diversification. "Industrial hemp was a major crop in the Midwest until the drug issue arose, and I think this crop will be grown again in the Midwest. Technology and chemistry have opened new doors to us. We can't sit around with our fingers in our ears."
Those with fingers in their ears will not hear the happy ringing of cash registers.
Cannabis already is the raw material for hundreds of legal products - from jeans to writing paper to cosmetics to cheese substitutes - being sold at dozens of Bay Area stores and nearly 1,000 stores nationwide.
Although hamstrung by U.S. prohibitions against growing even non-intoxicating strains of cannabis, a U.S. hemp industry dependent upon imported raw materials and products has grown from about zero to $50 million in five years. And that's peanuts compared with what will follow, said.John Roulac, president of Hemptech, an Ojai-based industrial hemp consulting firm.
"We're laying the foundation for what inevitably be a $100 billion industry in 20 years," he said.
Fashion may lead the way.
"Hemp is becoming very hot," said Owen Sercus, a professor in the textile development and marketing department of Manhattan's prestigious Fashion Institute of Technology. "I am going to predict that hemp is going to be the natural fiber for the 21st century."
Fashion designers Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein have climbed aboard the hemp bandwagon. Lauren disclosed earier this year that he secretly used hemp fabric in his clothing as far back as his safari-inspired fall '84 collections. Klein used hemp for decorative pillows and other items in his '9S home collection and has announced plans to use hemp in his clothing lines.
Adidas, Vans and other shoe manufacturers, meanwhile, either are marketing hemp- topped sneakers or plan to do so.
Hemp's appeal for the fashion industry is twofold. First and foremost are the fiber's intrinsic qualities: stronger than cotton, warmer than linen, more absorbent than nylon. But in addition, he notes, hemp is environmentally friendly.
Cotton, for example, has desirable features but is hard on the environment. Cotton requires not only huge amounts of water but also enormous quantities of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers.
Hemp, in contrast, will grow almost anywhere without depleting the soil and needs little, if any, pesticides and herbicides.
Those features, plus its high yield per acre, also make hemp a potential raw material for paper.
Paper from hemp fiber could spare many trees
Grinding up trees for paper has had a devastating impact on forests, yet demand for paper is growing. The price of newsprint, for example, has risen 40 percent over the past year be cause of scarcity, and further price increases are expected. With worldwide paper consumption at 260 million tons a year, substitutes for wood are eagerly being sought.
Hemp is the answer, Roulac said. Its longer fibers can be used for high-quality paper for books, magazines and stationery, he said, while its shorter fibers can make newsprint, tissue paper and packaging materials.
The giant International Paper Co., which has 72,000 employees and annual revenues of 513 billion, saw enough potential in hemp to send four representatives to Minneapolis in October for the founding session of the Industrial Hemp Council, which was created to explore hemp's potential. Tenting
Curtis Koster, head of International Paper's research department, later wrote a memo to Wisconsin's Sholts saying, "Hemp will likely prove to be the more economic fiber among several (being investigated by IP), given its yield per acre and its substantialIy greater range of products."
Hemp also can spare trees from being cut for construction materials, said Thomas Maloney, director of the Wood Materials and Engineering Laboratory of Washington State University.
Maloney, whose lab has been testing hemp for use in particleboard and lumber, said it has "real potential" as a wood substitute not only because it grows faster but also because its fibers are stronger than tree fibers.
Such applications for the long outlawed plant may seem remarkable. But many of hemp's uses were known long ago, then were forgotten, suppressed or ignored during recent decades of marijuana prohibition.
"It's like Rip Van Winkle," Roulac said. "The industry has been asleep for 60 years, except in Eastern Europe and Asia."
Hemp paper, for example, is hardly a new idea. Legend says the very first paper was made from hemp in China about 2,000 years ago. Later, cotton, linen wool and silk were used until chemical wood pulp began to dominate the paper industry in the late 19th century.
By 1916, the U.S. Department of Agriculture already had grown alarmed over the paper industry's impact on forests.
Department of Agriculture lauded hemp's potential
"Our forests are being cut three times as fast as they grow," said
a department bulletin published that year. " . . . It is advisable to investigate
the paper-making value of the more promising plant materials before a critical
situation arises."
The bulletin said hemp yields four times more pulp per acre than trees and is a potentially cheaper source for all grades of paper.
In 1938, Popular Mechanics magazine published an article headlined: "New Billion Dollar Crop." It said new machinery had solved the problem of how to extract the fibers from hemp stalks without prohibitive amounts of human labor.
"Hemp is the standard fiber for the world," the article said. It has great tensile strength and durability. It is used to produce more than 5,000 textile products, ranging from rope to fine laces and the woody 'hurds' remaining after the fiber has been removed contain more than 77 percent cellulose and can be used to produce more than 26,000 products, ranging from dynamite to Cellophane."
Ironically, by the time that article reached newsstands in February that year, the U.S. hemp industry had been outlawed by the federal Marihuana Tax Act of 1937.
The legislation intended to eliminate use of marijuana as an intoxicant. But its effect was to outlaw the plant root, stalk and flower, which came as a shock to the many hemp farmers and manufacturers who did not realize that marijuana came from the cannabis plant.
Because the tax act was passed without public hearings - and because it went so far beyond outlawing the smokable parts of the hemp plant - many hempsters contend hemp fell victim to a conspiracy by the timber and petroleum industries.
Whatever the case, the consequences endure. While banishment of the entire hemp industry is not mandated by the law, it gives the federal Drug Enforcement Administration authority to decide whether marijuana can be used as a medicine and whether it can be grown for industrial purposes.
And the DEA says no.
In 1992, over objections from a federal administrative law judge who
concluded after reviewing evidence that marijuana had medicinal benefits,
the DEA reaffirmed marijuana's designation as a Schedule 1drug, which means
it has no accepted medical use.
DEA rejects hemp bids as against 'public interest'
As for industrial uses, a DEA position paper says the agency has refused
to grant any licenses to grow hemp because it could undermine the "public
interest" by making marijuana more available.
Wisconsin's Sholts said the DEA was deeply apprehensive about the recent founding conference of the Industrial Hemp Council, which was attended by nearly 80 scientists and corporate representatives and five state farm bureau presidents. He was contacted beforehand by seven agents from three cities who told him the gathering was "a dumb idea.
Sholts said he urged the agents to attend the conference to discuss the issue, but they all declined.
Critics of the DEA's position fall into two camps.
One camp says hemp should be legalized for any use, especially in the
absence of proof that marijuana represents a serious health hazard.
The other camp wants to separate recreational use of marijuana from its medicinal and industrial uses. While many in this camp may not oppose recreational use, they say the desire to legalize pot should not become an obstacle to developing a hemp industry.
"There are two main reasons Europe will soon bypass U.S. hemp," Mari Kane, editor of Hemp World, an international hemp journal, wrote recently.
"One," Kane said, "they grow it regionally and can sell it cheaper due to reduced shipping costs.... Secondly, European hempsters know how to 'separate the rope from the dope.' Hemp in Europe is an environmental issue, not at all connected with drug legalization."
European nations permit industrial hemp only
Kane noted in an interview that numerous European countries - including
England, France, Germany and Switzerland - allow cultivation of non-intoxicating
strains of hemp for industrial purposes while continuing to outlaw marijuana.
Canada also allows cultivation of industrial hemp.
Christie Boiling, a director of this country's 100-member Hemp Industries
Association, said Europe and Canada are not the only competitors that will
surge ahead of the United States unless laws and policies here change.
She noted that researchers and merchants from more than 20 countries gathered in Frankfurt, Germany, in February for Bioresource Hemp 95, the largest-ever hemp symposium and trade show.
Kane said Congress should rethink the role of the DEA. Indusrial hemp should be under the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture, she said, not under the control of a drug enforcement agency for which prohibition has become a cash crop.
Joe Hickey, head of the Kentucky Hemp Growers Cooperative, agrees it's time to re- evaluate hemp. He said Kentucky farmers can grow six tons of hemp biomass per acre in about 100 days. A major fiberglass manufacturer, he said, has calculated that six tons of biomass would produce (1.5) tons of usable fiber with a market value of $3,000.
"So just for fiber for making fiberglass, we'm talking $3,000 per acre, and that doesn't count (sale of) other hurds and bast fibers," Hickey said.
Poll favors legalization, but illegality is 'obstacle'
Kentucky Gov. Brewton Jones last November assembled a task force to
investigate hemp's potential, but it quickly concluded it was not a viable
crop. Hickey, however, said he thinks the task force - perhaps because
of external pressures - rushed to a premature and faulty conclusion.
He may be right. The task force concluded that legal prohibition is the "overriding obstacle" to developing a hemp industry and that any proposed changes in current laws "would likely receive strong diverse reactions from both private and public sectors"
But a recent poll showed that nearly 75 percent of Kentucky residents support legalization.
Terri Woods, spokeswoman for the University of Kentueky's survey research center, whieh conducted the poll said support cut across all categorles. Whether Democrat or Republican, urban or rural, young or old, Kentuckians thought industrial hemp was worth a try, she said.
Hickey said he remains optimistic because he knows how quickly the U.S. government can change its mind.
Five years after banishing the hemp industry, the federal govemment, suddenly in need of fiber for its war effort, abruptly changed its policies and encouraged American farmers to grow the outlawed plant. The U.S. Department of Agriculture even produced a documentary film, "Hemp for Victory."
The film, released in 1942, chronicled the history of hemp, noting, "Long ago, when these ancient Grecian temples were new, hemp was already old in the service of mankind."
Hickey said he thinks hemp again will become indispensable as fiber shortages grow and the world begins to seek alternatives to a petroleum-based economy.
"I've never seen anything that crosses so many lines," he said. "What other crop do we have out there with so much potential?"